How to converting the 8-digit time stamp

Dear all: I am teaching a big class and would like to use Excel to assign bonus to students if they submitted the assignment prior to a given date. I have downloaded all submissions from Canvas. Below is an example file name for a student's submission.

userid_61900XX_65052415_ProblemSet2.xlsx

I know the first number (61900XX) is a student's unique id for my Canvas course and the second number (8-digit: 65052415) seems to be a time stamp of assignment submission. This number doesn't look like a standard Unix time stamp. My question is: Is there a way to convert this 8-digit number into the format I can recognize, like 2018-03-28 13:23? Thanks!

You cannot determine the submission time directly from that number because that number is not always 8 digits and it is never a timestamp. It's the ID of the attachment. That most likely makes it sequential so the bigger the number the later it was submitted, but it cannot be converted into a timestamp directly using any formula.

However, if all you're after is whether or not it was before a certain time, then one way to do this is to set the due date to the time you want it due. Then when you download the files, it will add the word "_late_" to the title if it is submitted after the due date.

If you don't even want to consider late work for this assignment, then you can set the available until date and then people won't be able to turn it in late at all, meaning that everyone who has turned it in did it by the date you specified.

If the assignment is already collected, then the late status is updated in SpeedGrader, but the assignments continue to be on-time or late based on their status when they were first uploaded. In other words, changing the due date now won't make something late that was on time when it was submitted (I assume this: I tested this the other way, making something on-time that was originally late). For me, the file continued to show "_late_" even though I had changed the date to make it non-late.

What you can do in this situation is go into SpeedGrader, click on the Options, and sort by the date they submitted the assignment.

Then you can scroll through the list of students until you see which ones were submitted before the due date by looking at the submission information at the top right.

It doesn't matter to what you're trying to accomplish. So as a point of clarification, that first ID is the user ID for your institution's Canvas; it is not unique to your course.

Here's the explanation of why you can't convert that ID to a timestamp, but it's needless for what you're trying to do.

Here's what I see for one of my assignments when I download all submissions. The number you're talking about is 112491023.

The date is the date and time when the file was compressed into the ZIP file, so that's not usable.

Here is what the information looks like in SpeedGrader for the instructor (this is a test document that I've uploaded 10 times, but this is the last version).

When I pull up the information about the submission through the API, I get this response. I've removed a bunch of non-related information.

Notice that the attachments id property is that magic number 112491023.

But, as part of that information that is returned is the information that you need to get the dates. It's the submitted_at timestamp, although it's also available as the attachements created_at timestamp.

What I've shown is actually one element in an array. In other words, the submissions API returns returns an array of submissions. The attachments within each of those is an array.

If you have programming skills, you can get the submissions for the assignment and then iterate through them to extract the dates and reconstruct the name of the file. However, if you're going that way, it would be easier to just create a report that listed the student's name and the submission time, rather than trying to recreate the filename.

All of that is overkill for your situation, where there are ways to accomplish what you want without resorting to programming.

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment. Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.